Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

For each believes his glimm'ering lamp to be the gorgeous light of day.

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

I think people will believe anything about someone they haven't seen for a while.

We too, through lack of knowledge and of sufficiently mature reflection, mistook the visible outward appearance of the phenomenon for the phenomenon itself.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

How little do they see what really is, who frame their hasty judgment upon that which seems.

Things are NEVER what they seem, Pa, I thought. I used to think they were, but I was wrong or stupid or blind or something. Old folks are forever complaining about their failing eyesight, but I think your vision gets better as you get older. Mine surely was.

We are led to believe a lie When we see not through the eye.

Did you ever think that maybe what you see isn't really what's true?

People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.

Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be.

Because I'm quiet, people think I'm really cold, or rude, or snobby. But I'm literally scared to talk to them.

I'm just not wearing any makeup. People thinking I'm wearing prosthetics of all sorts, I just don't have any makeup on.

But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was candles, did she think she'd done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?

The thing that sometimes gets lost is people look at the harder edge of me ... the leather jacket and the tough rock 'n' roll attitude... and get the wrong impression that I'm mean. That's really something I don't want people to think because I don't think that's the case.

Generally, a lot of the things people think are made up are real, a lot of the things people think are real are made up, a lot of the things people think are spontaneous are cleverly faked, and a lot of the things people think are fake are spontaneous.

nothing is more common than to mistake the sign for the thing itself; nor is any practice more frequent than that of endeavoring to acquire the exterior mark, without once thinking to labor after the interior grace.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about...Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings, who don't have all the answers, to think that they do.

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.

All descriptions of reality are limited expressions of the world of emptiness. Yet we attach to the descriptions and think they are reality. That is a mistake.

Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny and nothing else.

When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us-and rightly-that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed.

Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.

I'm suddenly worried people will think that I believe their religion can be summed up on four sex-obsessed sentences.

This is always history's greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.